Upon arrival you will be greeted by your host and escorted to Finca Adalgisa, an upscale retreat that features separate private cottagesoverlooking one of the last remaining historical vineyards in the area with the mountains as a backdrop. Welcome dinner in 1884, the restaurant of Escorihuela winery, run by the wellknown argentine chef Francis Mallmann.

Otavalo hosts probably the most famous tourists' market in South America, and most definitely Ecuador's most important. The Otavalan Indians, the women instantly recognizable by the layers of gold necklaces which throng their necks, are renowned for their textiles and weaving, but also for their business acumen … and ambition.

Five fishermen are sitting around on makeshift benches beneath a palm shelter behind Miss Sophie's guesthouse. They wear dusty cut-off slacks and baseball caps. It is nearly noon, they are back from the morning on the sea, and their boats bob on the wavelets just beyond the muddy beach at the end of the yard.

the idea of skiing in the Andes is still sufficiently exotic to create a stir among friends who have just put their skis back in the attic after a relatively humdrum trip to Val d’Isère

You didn’t train?’ Craig, a custom-home builder from Ohio, who had spent the past months lifting weights at his club and pedalling in front of the TV, was not inspiring confidence in me.

The flight south from Santiago is stunning. At our cruising altitude of 30,000 feet I can see across the entire breadth of Chile: Out of the left window the horizon is cluttered with the jagged line of Andean peaks that forms the border with Argentina; out of the right window the Pacific Ocean beats a harsh rhythm against a rugged coastline of sheer sided fjords and myriad islands. We fly above perfect conical volcanoes, glittering lakes and lush farmland…

Nowhere else has that magical tag 'most southernly point in the world', and the name alone, which translates as Land of Fire, is enough to have Indiana Jones rushing to book his ticket - indeed, visitors from Charles Darwin to Bruce Chatwin have described their fascination with the place

Everybody loves a good record. There's something about a ‘highest, longest, furthest, lowest, smallest, biggest' tag that immediately lends cachet and class to a person or a place. Discovery Channel has a series called ‘The 10 most…', magazines run endless lists of ‘The Top 10' whatevers, and then there's the Guinness Book of Records. So, if I tell you that the Cotahuasi Canyon in southern Peru is 1,850 metres (6,000 ft) deeper than the Grand Canyon, you're no doubt surpr...

The Plan: To make a journey of roughly 4,500 kms around southern Peru travelling in a 4WD vehicle. My aim is to visit and photograph as many of the key cities, historical sites and Inca ruins as I can along the way but also to absorb as much of the local culture, attitudes, way of life and environment in which they live.

In Cusco, the Inca capital, the ancient masonry is so supple you'd swear that the stones were woven. We leave it one frost-fanged morning on the six a.m. train for our destination, Machu Picchu. The old pistons wheeze out an eponymous pant - "machu-picchu-machu-picchu" - as the train inches up a series of switch-backs towards the lip of Cusco Valley, then ramps off into the bright Andean sky.

'Mula, carajo, mula!" is what Peruvian muleteers shout to drive their beasts up and down the Andean mountains of the Vilcabamba region. No English expression quite captures the fricative force of "carajo", but "damn you, mule" is about right.

It was an early morning in July and Alberto Olivera was manoeuvring his minibus along the treacherous mountain road from La Paz to Coroico.

The key thing that differentiates Buenos Aires from Paris (the two often seem indistinguishable) is tango.

The Porteños, the natives of Buenos Aires, like to confide to visitors that theirs is the most European of Latin American cities. There’s certainly truth in it. Buenos Aires has, by turns, the chic of the Italians, mansards and cobbles from Belle Epoque Paris and a love of dogs and gentlemens’ clubs that rivals the British.

In Recoleta they often die as they have lived — beyond their means. Buenos Aires' most prestigious suburb, Recoleta, has its own exclusive necropolis where row upon row of marble vaults accommodate the dusty repose of the city's once-gilded elite.

Paradise is a dimly lit dance hall in San Telmo, Buenos Aires’ oldest barrio. In front of me is a bottle of rough, deep red Malbec that cost about five pesos (less than a pound) and, drunk on romance and melancholy, I’m lost in a tango blur.

The site is probably the most familiar symbol of the Inca Empire, due to its unique location, its geological features, and its late discovery in 1911.

I’d met Luciana in the street during the Carnival in Brazil and she invited me to stay her afterwards in her apartment on the other side of Recife. But from the moment I stepped inside I knew it wasn’t going to work out.

The wealthy in a poor country tend to be far richer than the wealthy in a rich country. There may not be quite as many zeros in their bank accounts but what they do have can buy a hell of a lot more at local prices.

Brazil is a world leader in economic indifference. The division of wealth here is so appalling that you wonder why no one ever seems to talk about it. The glitzy shipping malls in Rio de Janeiro are full of rich kids trying on the Emperor’s new clothes whilst the poor are dodging bullets in the favelas and praying to Maria for a way out.

Most tourists get the wrong idea about Brazilian sexuality. The media hype Brazil as a land of easy sex in order to draw millions of foreign men each year to enjoy the Carnival.

Lapa is the only real Rio nightlife for me. It’s a street in a historic district of the city where all classes and ages of people come to mingle through the drift of faces, tipsy and illuminated.

Because of Brazil’s size, there is a lot of regional variation in climate. However, 90% of the country falls within the tropical zone, so it rarely gets very cold. Because it is in the southern hemisphere, the seasons are opposite those in the northern hemisphere: summer occurs from December to March.

Mendoza is located 1,037 km (650 miles)and just two hours away by plane from Buenos Aires. Even though the city was founded in 1561, it shows very few remains of its original buildings since they were swept away by a fierce earthquake. San Francisco Church is one of the few vestiges of its colonial architecture.

This charming village, located on the Lake Lacar shore, is the head of theLanín National Park, which gathers twenty four glacial lakes. The city, with 25,000 inhabitants, receives several flights a week from Buenos Aires.

IN an odd turn of the wheel, Rio as an international tourist destination has gone back to where it was when I first arrived here in 1976 as a college student exploring Brazil's long coastline by bus. Today, as before, Rio is off the beaten track.

The third annual Fest'in World Music Festival will be held from Aug. 26 to 29 in Salvador, capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, a 90-minute flight from Rio de Janeiro. The festival will showcase a variety of music from the Caribbean, United States, Africa and, of course, Brazil.

I got back recently from Suriname (nope, not in Africa - it's in the NE corner of South America), where I was part of a small educational tour of six students and a professor of archeology who had done research there before.

This complex, energetic, and seductive port city, which stretches south-to-north along the Rio de la Plata, has been the gateway to Argentina for centuries. Portenos, as the multinational people of Buenos Aires are known, possess an elaborate and rich cultural identity.

January 1st - New Year's Day 6th - Epiphany